Mark Ritson – Market Research

Psychographic segmentation has been out of favour for a while despite its obvious usefulness, but combining it with behavioural and addressable data creates a potent mix that could make targeting supremely effective.

Even if we smack our heads in frustration when consumers make stupid choices, there’s nothing worse than a marketer who wastes money ‘educating’ a market. Customers’ perceptions must become your reality.

I have a client who I work for each year helping to run their global marketing training. We send 700 executives a super-sexy iPad Mini at the start of the year, which has uploaded on it case studies, readings and simulations that we will use to train them during the year.

I have a very good friend, Tony, who runs an abattoir. He’s from farming stock and, in a decision driven as much by his head as his heart, bought the small local abattoir before it went bust and left hundreds of smallholders unable to butcher their livestock without long transportation journeys that would have made their animals uncomfortable and their slaughter uneconomic.

With three weeks to go before the general election, the media seems to have gone politically bonkers. You can’t turn a page or switch on the TV without an immediate update on the upcoming election. Marketers are not exempt from all this either.

Of all the concepts in the marketing universe, the most important gift we give our organisations is market orientation. It’s the omega of our discipline because it challenges a manager to recognise the fundamental truth that a) consumers are the source of a company’s success, but that b) these consumers inevitably see the world very differently from the employees that work within the company and who devise the strategies aimed at those consumers.

Of all the academic research published, the most intriguing and entertaining has always been by public health researchers on driving impairment. Since the 1950s, researchers have paid undergraduate ‘subjects’ (who will do almost anything for free booze) to drive round a test circuit, drink three large glasses of wine and then redo the task. A generation of students have confirmed the finding that when people are slightly drunk they don’t drive very well.

Read our feature on how to get the most out of NPS Lego Club placed an ad for a marketer in last week’s Marketing Week. Keen to demonstrate just how savvy and ambitious its marketing department is, Lego revealed that it was aiming for 5 million club members by 2015 and a net promoter score […]